Violence of the Tongue(Emmanuel Charles McCarthy)

Physical violence tears the body apart. The violence of the tongue shreds the soul. Shaming, humiliating, demeaning, belittling cut into the very being of the person. They can hurt, debilitate or kill as thoroughly as a gun shot.Belittlement—the normal and accepted daily fare of radio and TV news, entertainment and commentary, of video games and films, of politics, the military, commerce and religion—strangles the Holy within each person. Humility is the gateway to heaven, but humiliation is the gateway to hell for both victim and victimizer. There is no form of humiliation that is not violence. There is no form of violence that is not humiliation. Today in our culture and in our time, agents of humiliation, shame, and belittlement are viewed as heroes and admired celebrities to be imitated by most children and adults, Christian or otherwise. Humiliating, shaming and belittling other human beings for fun, profit, status, and power is the overarching spiritual-social-psychological disease infecting US society. It is a virulent epidemic being spread systemically to nation after nation by America's military, political, economic and media power. War, of course, initiates and spreads humiliation and shame more rapidly and thoroughly than it initiates the spreading of physical disease, for which it is infamous. Peace by way of shaming, belittling, humiliating others, however, is a venomous lie, authored by the "Father of lies who is a murderer from the beginning." The kind person does not humiliate. Only the cruel shame and belittle their fellow human beings. The Christian's task and the Jew's task, in a world that revels in humiliating and shaming, is to cover the shame of others as they would desire their own shame to be covered before God and humanity. It is not the task of Christians or Jews to shame and humiliated other sons and daughters of the "Father of all, the Holy One, Blessed be He." Emmanuel Charles McCarthy